Starting a Fall Project

 

Now that the weather is cooling down, albeit temporarily, my thoughts have turned back to my "woodshop" in the garage and what project I might tackle next. The altar and coffee table have inspired me to do a bit more woodworking that I have these past few years. Thus I started looking at the wall above and came up with an idea to pursue.

When I first moved into this house, I bought a sheet of pegboard and put it up to the left side of the door from the garage into the kitchen. On it mostly hangs some straight edge, leveling and gutting tools with a few odds and ends like hearing protection, dust protection and screw drivers. It works but I have grown to dislike it. All the dust I create during woodworking leaves the tools coated in dust all the time. Inconvenient for hand tools but dirtying up the face of my respirator causes me to constantly clean and blow it out before using which means I often go without it and thus defeat the purpose. Another fundamental problem I have with the pegboard is that the "pegs" that I put in place to hold various tools in position continually fall out when I remove a tool requiring me to find the errant peg, figure out exactly which two holes it belonged in and put it back in followed by the tool. Finally, it is just a colossal waste of space. Everything is spread out in two dimensions essentially and there is a lot of unused space between the tools and also out into the third dimension.

My thoughts turned to the cabinets on the side wall of the shop. They protect everything stored in them from dirt which I like and just out into the third dimension to hold more tools but the pegs are replaced with shelves that have storage issue problems of their own for small hand tools when it comes to organizing and retrieving. I started thinking of ways to fix that issue and came across an idea.

My idea is to make a cabinet roughly the size of the other cabinets in the garage but in essence create several hinged doors that will essentially slice all the storage space up into thinner slices. On the fronts and backs of each of those doors, I can custom build hooks or ways to store various hand tools that I have around the shop, protect them from dust and more effectively utilize the third dimension of space in my shop. This was just a rough draft of a design and the cabinet I plan to build will have a deeper initial box that gets mounted to the wall, deep enough to hold things such as hand planes (currently stored elsewhere) and my respirator. The hinged doors can hold smaller items such as chisels, saws, screwdrivers, straight edges, etc. 

The more I thought about it, the more I thought this project worthy of pursuing. Even though I don't have a plan for how to fit all the tools into it, I can easily build and figure out positions in stages over the course of the next couple months or more since my final project of the year often drags into spring due to something called winter where the shop becomes unpleasant to work in.